Gullible Reporting by UPI...

Almost exactly six months ago, the New York Times was taken in by a well-orchestrated media event by NC Warn, an antinuclear activist group, when its editors chose to publish an Energy and Environment Special Report titled Nuclear Energy Loses Cost Advantage. On January 28, 2010, the UPI published a story in their Science News section titled Cheap solar energy set to displace n-power that was based on exactly the same source of misinformation.

Like the Times piece, the UPI story was poorly researched. It includes several marketing quotes from a solar systems salesman. Here is the lede of the UPI's "science news" story:

New research has established that sophisticated new solar energy production methods make it far and away the cheapest and least hazardous energy source, certainly cheaper and safer than nuclear power.

The latest findings come through research by a British market leader in renewable energy production following on from studies at Duke University in Durham, N.C. (Emphasis added. Even the biased sources used only claim cost parity, not superiority.)

That "market leader in renewable energy" is identified as Ken Moss, chief executive officer at U.K. solar power developer and producer mO3. mO3 is a company whose survival depends on convincing government decision makers to mandate an income stream from electricity customers. Under existing rules, those customers are forced to pay exorbitant feed-in-tariffs to support his company's expensive, unreliable, weather-dependent solar parks. A number of government leaders want to reduce those subsidy payments as part of an important effort to reduce deficit spending.

In addition to basing a science news story on marketing claims from someone with a direct financial interest in obscuring the truth, the UPI did not provide accurate information its other source. The primary source for the UPI story was NOT part of a series of "studies" produced by the institution called Duke University as the above quote implies. Instead, the source was a single paper commissioned by NC Warn, a group that publicly advertises that fighting nuclear energy is one of its primary focus areas.

Aside: I suppose it is not a lie to say that the paper was written at a place called Duke University. The professor and the grad student might actually have used the Duke University library and maybe even a computer and printer owned by the university. End Aside.

The paper was made public with a mass press release; it was not published in any peer reviewed journal. Soon after the paper's availability was announced, a freelance reporter named Diana S. Powers wrote a special report for the New York Times titled Nuclear Energy Loses Cost Advantage.

As far as I could tell from that report, Ms. Powers did not even read the full paper to understand the basis for the claim. She certainly did not consult any other sources that might help her understand the truth. Instead, she simply did exactly what an antinuclear activist group wanted her and other journalists to do; she published a biased claim painting a rosy picture of solar energy accompanied by additional incorrect information about nuclear energy.

An article published July 27 in an Energy Special Report analyzed the costs of nuclear energy production. It quoted a study that found that electricity from solar photovoltaic systems could now be produced less expensively than electricity from new nuclear power plants.

In raising several questions about this issue and the economics of nuclear power, the article failed to point out, as it should have, that the study was prepared for an environmental advocacy group, which, according to its Web site, is committed to ‘‘tackling the accelerating crisis posed by climate change — along with the various risks of nuclear power.’’ The article also failed to take account of other studies that have come to contrasting conclusions, or to include in the mix of authorities quoted any who elaborated on differing analyses of the economics of energy production.

Although the article did quote extensively from the Web site of the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group, representatives of the institute were not given an opportunity to respond to the claims of the study. This further contributed to an imbalance in the presentation of this issue.

After having an Atomic Insights reader point to the existence of the UPI story, I visited that article and attempted to add a clarifying comment to warn UPI readers that the story was a poorly researched lie. The Atomic Insights reader had informed me that his correcting comment had been screened off by the moderator, so I tried to be careful in my wording. However, since I am not sure if my comment will get published by the UPI, I figured I would share it with you here.

Some myths will never die, especially when they are tales that serve the economic interests of the people who repeat them. The story above quotes Ken Moss, a solar system salesman.

The truth is that solar PV electricity is frightfully costly - the only reason that it even exists in the market is that taxpayers often supply as much as 65% of the cost of the system installation. In addition, electricity customers called "ratepayers" are often forced to pay solar electricity suppliers a price that is often two to five times the market price for electricity.

(By the way, do you know any tax payers who are not also rate payers? We all end up paying twice to help the often wealthy people who decorate their homes or businesses with "feel good" solar panels.)

The "study" was done in North Carolina by a retired professor from Duke and a first year graduate student. It was NOT done by Duke University. It was sponsored by an antinuclear activist organization called NC Warn that calls itself an environmental group. The study was boldly titled "Solar and Nuclear Costs — The Historic Crossover: Solar Energy is Now the Better Buy", but if you actually read the study you will find that the Appendix computed a solar PV COST of 35 cents per kilowatt hour. That compares very unfavorably with the average cost of electricity from our installed fleet of 104 nuclear power plants of just 2.03 cents per kilowatt hour.

The NC Warn sponsored study claimed that the cost for the customer for solar electricity, with the system financed at a low rate of 6% over 20 years, was 15.9 cents because US federal taxpayers paid 30% of the cost of the panel and installation and the taxpayers in the state of North Carolina paid 35% of the cost. Those generous gifts seemed like such a great deal that the money ran out long before all interested people were able to buy their roof decorations.

This was a reverse Robin Hood kind of arrangement where even people who live in apartments and could not afford their own suburban roofs provided forced contributions to the often prosperous people who thought that the panels would make them look "green" in the eyes of their neighbors. It is nice, I guess, to be on the good side of the Sheriff of Nottingham.

I wrote about this "study" last summer when the story first appeared in the New York Times. My analysis appeared in an Atomic Insights post titled "Gullible Reporting by the New York Times on the Cost of Solar Electricity Versus Nuclear Electricity." After a little storm arose in the nuclear blogging world, the NY Times editors took the rare step of issuing an "Editor's Note" essentially apologizing for the inaccuracy of the report. That apology is still appended to the Times article about the antinuclear activist sponsored study.

There is additional evidence that the anonymous author of the UPI article had an antinuclear motive for writing his brief piece. Here is what he wrote after the lede:

The nuclear power generation industry and its various lobbies have successfully campaigned for the nuclear option as the most economical for consumers planning for large increases in demand for electricity.

Outside the United States, too, nuclear power generation has won new friends in recent years despite controversies over nuclear energy's dual use -- the other as a weapon of mass destruction.

Rod Adams gained his nuclear knowledge as a submarine engineer officer and as the founder of a company that tried to develop a market for small, modular reactors from 1993-1999. He began publishing Atomic Insights in 1995 and began producing The Atomic Show Podcast in March 2006. Following his Navy career and a three year stint with a commerical nuclear power plant design firm, he began ...

A guest says:

A guest says:

I have no bone to fight this article, other than to mention that there is not one nuke plant built in the world that hasn't used at least some sort of financial state support. Even in the capitalist usa, you cannot built a plant using only investor funding, if you cannot provide a paper stating that Uncle Sam will guarantee all bills if they come due before the owner has had enough time to generate the required cash to pay those construction bills, who can keep coming for at least 5 yearsbefore even a milliwatt of power is generated.

If the grist of the article is to say that nuke power is the only solution, then I disagree, since nuke plants are baseload generators that cannot be turned of after the peak power demand in the day has passed. As such they are a great solution to supply a 20% baseload demand running during the whole day, and not designed to ramp up during the day when all airco's start spinning in full summer.

Nuke plants therefore also need some sort of power storage for when demand is low (weekend nights) while they continue to run, since you can't turn them off at wish. The USA built 18 000 MW in pumped hydro storage to cover the power production of those 104 NPP after peak power load is passed, electricity then being resold at peak power rates by the utility to ratepayers, prices that aren't reflected in the baseload NPP power production, since they aren't the same power producing systems.

As such the end story is that NPP can have their place in a power generation mix, as have solar PV panels producing electricity at 13 cents per kWh during peak power demand, when peak power retail rates are way way above the 13 cents per kWh. And solar PV panels have no radioactive wastes at their end of life.

Solar Photovoltaics (PV) is Cost-Competitive Now. So some nudnik from the oil or coal industries can stand up and say, PV is 40 c/kWh and not be lying. And I can say it is 13 c/kWh and not be lying, and all without a cent of incentives, not even traditional depreciation. Simply put, there are places and PV systems today that can sell electricity at 13 c/kWh, or even 10 c/kWh, and make an adequate return. They are cost-effective at those prices without a cent of incentives, no carbon price, and not even traditional depreciation. And there is a potential for billions of watts of these systems and, as the years go by, a diffusion of their locations from the sunniest to less sunny places.Assuming the simplest system, a flat-plate CdTe system like First Solar makes, we can expect about the following properties:* Cost less than $3/W installed (stated publicly by First Solar VP, Maja Wessels, at our GW Solar Institute annual symposium in April)* Annual AC output in the US SW of about 1.9 kWh/W (DC) installed (including all losses)* O&M about $15/kW-yr, including insurance and inverter replacement* Thus one can calculate annual revenue per watt, at o 13 c/kWh as 24.7 c/W-yr (multiply 1.9 kWh/W-yr times 13 c/kWh) o 10 c/kWh as 19 c/W-yr o Calculate annual gross profit (revenue after subtracting operating costs of $0.015/W) of + 24.7 minus 1.5 c/W-yr = 23.2 c/W-yr (at 13 c/kWh) + 17.5 c/W-yr (at 10 c/kWh) + And calculate first-year return on investment as annual gross profit divided by initial investment (300 c/W) # 23.2 c/300 c = 7.73% (at 13 c/kWh) # 17.5/300 = 5.83% (at 10 c/kWh)

Present PV systems have warranties for 25-30 years at under 1% per year degradation, so worst case, this cash flow drops 1% per year. Most PV systems are actually expected to do better, and lose less than 0.5% per year. One could argue for a power purchase agreement to sell the electricity for 10 c/kWh and a 0.5% per year inflation clause and get the 5.83% return indefinitely, like a perpetual bond or an annuity with no end date. Right now, I can’t get 5.83% without selling my soul to Goldman Sachs. How about you?

http://www.thesolarfuture.nl/nieuws/tag/futureFlanders leading the way in Belgium with photovoltaics. In February 2010, Flemish (Belgian) PV market grew by almost 220 MWp to an accumulated capacity of 312 MWp.24 cents per kWh is about 70% of the current utility peak power price now being paid in California by home owners using the cheapest fossil fuel generated peak electrical power supply. In other words, if you install PV panels close to users in California, you come ahead compared to new fossil fueled peak E-generators, given that new fossil fueled peak E-generators also need new distribution grids to get the juice flowing to where it is used.

03 December 2010 - The French Government is to halt all plans for new solar projects, except residential systems less than 3kW, in a bid to end a "veritable speculative bubble" that has emerged in the industry, said Prime Minister, Francois Fillon. According to Fillon, if things continued at the current rate, solar development targets for 2012 will be reached "within weeks." The new rules aim to balance a target of 500MW of new solar projects a year, protecting consumers by keeping power prices down. These prices are at risk of rising at an unmanageable rate as the cost of the feed-in tariff is passed on by the electricity companies to the consumer. EDF currently pays more for solar power than for the nuclear power it produces at 58 written off reactors, and almost as as much as what it can buy on European spot electricity markets. The electricity provider is anticipated to pay an average of EUR 54,6 (US$72,2) cents a kWh for solar power in 2011. This compares with estimated spot market power prices of EUR 55 (US$73) cents a kWh.Legislators work on new tariffs for ‘larger’ solar PV installations that are expected to include rules providing caps on development and lowering feed-in tariffs for solar PV projects. “Most panels installed in France were made in China with a highly questionable carbon footprint,” Environment Minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet says, according to Bloomberg. She says the policy must “create jobs in France, not subsidise Chinese industry.” The newswire says if current developments are completed, France could reach its 2020 target of 5.4 GW of solar capacity by the end of 2011.

January 28, 2011 - Red Electrica reported this week that in 2010, Spain generated nearly 3 percent or 6.9 TWh of its electricity from solar energy, wind turbines generated nearly 16.4 percent or 43 TWh, slightly more than hydroelectricity's share of 14.5 percent or 38 TWh.The new renewables of wind and solar in combination provided 19 percent of supply. Together both new and conventional renewables delivered 34 percent of Spain's electricity.Spain's climate, geography, and population are similar to that of California. Spain's 46 million inhabitants consume some 260 TWh per year.California's 37 million people consume about 300 TWh per year. However, wind energy generates less than 6 TWh per year and solar less than 1 TWh per year. Together wind and solar provide only 2 percent of California's electricity.

France gets about 78% of its power from nuclear and uses its nuclear plants in load-following mode because they are designed that way. France has about 12% hydro which also is operated in load-following mode.

France has 0.36 lb of CO2/$ of GDP, the US has 0.96. For the US to get to the level of France it will have to spend trillions of dollars on its power generation systems. France reprocesses the partially spent fuel from its reactors to produce new fuel for its reactors. French electric rates are among the lowest in Europe. I think France made a wise decision about 5 decades ago.

In the power industry 25 or 40 year cash flow spreadsheets are used to determine the levelized cost of various alternatives. I suggest you calculate the levelized cost using a 25-year spreadsheet for PV solar using the cost of money paid back as with a mortgage on a house, PV panel degradation, O&M, with and without subsidies, and then compare it with the levelized cost of utility power increasing at, say, 3% per year. It sounds complicated but a smart grocery clerk can do it. Below is an example and the websites of some other articles.

Paul O - you are pulling my leg, right? Do you really believe that the Arjun Makhijani of the IEER and the Helen Caldicott founded group called the Physicians for Social Responsibility deserve the appellation of "expert" when it comes to energy.

Of course, the link you provided is a press release issued by those groups. I guess they have the free speech right to call themselves experts in any topic; there is no legal requirement for proof.

More importantly it makes me wonder how we can correctly tackle our serious energy problems if such reporting pervades the media with muted or absent crticism. There are members of the public who afterall really believe these "experts"

Experts: 'Clean' Energy Standard Should Not Include Nuclear, Coal

WASHINGTON, Jan. 26, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ --If Congress and the White House intend to move forward with a "clean energy standard" (CES), it will be a huge contradiction to include nuclear reactors and coal-fired power plants, according to three experts.